Twitter

I’m on Twitter (yah, I can’t believe it either).

For those of you curious to know what I think about it, please read Jason’s post, which is a near-verbatim copy of what I would have said had I written on the topic first. Read. It.

OK, so I told myself I wasn’t going to write any more on the subject, but I can’t resist; I just kind of feel the need to qualify and defend my use of such an ostensible waste of time.

I’m not going to lie, when I first heard about Twitter some months ago, I railed on it and couldn’t believe people were actually excited about such a seemingly banal service. In fact, just a few days ago, I answered Twitter’s “what are you doing?” question with: “feeling dirty and ridiculous for typing this very message.”

I’m not quite sure how to explain it, but sometime in the last few days I’ve kind of come around to Twitter (not least because every single tech-type person I know is on it and because Twitterific is awesome). Now, this is saying a lot for me because I don’t belong to any of the social-networking sites (e.g., MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Virb, etc.) and gave up IRC and IM cold-turkey a few years ago.

The impetus behind this forbearance is quite simple: I just don’t have the time. What time isn’t taken up by being a first-year associate at a large IP firm is spent on this site, life, etc. The last thing I want to do is unleash my obsessive-compulsive propensities on some web site that isn’t mine — I like to centralize my thoughts and have complete control over how they’re presented.

That said, Twitter is different and I’m not quite sure why. While its purpose and usefulness is as malleable as any web-related thing I’ve ever seen, I’ve found that I, in my very limited use, kind of treat it as a micro-blogging platform where I can just plop down whatever enters my head without having to think too much about it. In other words, the opposite of how I approach posts on this site. There is no pressure.

To be honest, I still haven’t embraced it fully, but I think that over time I’ll be able to, especially when more of my non-tech friends start drinking the kool-aid.

Before getting carried away here, I should temper my enthusiasm with the following caveat: if Twitter starts to ‘devolve’ into a general-purpose IM platform, I’ll likely pull out of it relatively quickly. However, if it can remain a kind of one-to-many status tool, I think I may be using it for some time to come.

Finally, Ev, thank you so much for giving Twitter all of its rightful vowels — I think Twittr would have turned me off from jump.

Mind control?

Without giving too much away, there was a scene in last night’s episode of LOST — when Ben’s daughter is talking to Locke about Ben — where she says, “That’s what my father does. He manipulates people. He makes you think it’s your idea, but it’s his.” My girlfriend immediately looked at me and said, “That’s exactly what you do!”

I don’t know whether to feel accomplished or ashamed.

Introducing Slugger+ for WordPress and MarsEdit

MarsEdit is great, but it’s lacking one very important feature, namely the ability to specify a slug when posting to a WordPress weblog. If there is one thing that Daniel Jalkut (the new owner and maintainer of the software) needs to fix, it’s this slug thing.

The whole point of MarsEdit is to provide a layer of abstraction between your words and the system that publishes your words — “an email-like interface for editing and publishing your words.” To put it another way, I should never have to use the WordPress interface to post (or edit). However, as it stands now, if I’m posting something with a rather long title, that long title becomes a long slug unless I log into WordPress and change it, thereby defeating one of the main purposes of using MarsEdit to begin with.

I’ve no doubt Daniel will take care of this annoyance as soon as time permits, not least because he himself uses WordPress and MarsEdit and must be plagued by the same problem. But until then, I present to you Slugger+. I’m using the “+” because this is actually a simple modification of a great plugin called Slugger by Colin Devroe, which allows you to define a slug from within your post’s content (Update: Colin has given Slugger+ his seal of approval). If that doesn’t make sense, be sure to check out Colin’s wonderful screencast of the plugin in action.

Slugger is a great solution (and is well-written) — insert your slug, wrapped in a custom tag, into the body of your post and ferret it out when needed — but it suffers from a couple of problems as far as I’m concerned.

The plugin requires you to insert into the content of your post certain text of the form, “[slug]slug[\/slug]” The problem is that the plugin never actually removes this text from the content of the post, but rather filters it out each and every time the post is called (e.g., through the RSS feed, individual archive, etc.). Not only do I not like superfluous text in my posts, I hate the the idea that processor cycles are being spent on removing the now useless text (i.e., $post_name is already defined) each time the post is accessed.

My modifications fix both of these issues by removing the slug-specifying text during the initial XML-RPC transaction, thereby obviating the need to constantly filter for the slug.

In my opinion, this ‘plussed’ version of Colin’s plugin makes MarsEdit much more attractive to us WordPress users.

HumaneText has stopped working

Update: The recent Mac OS X.4.9 update fixed me right up. Go figure.

I’ve been using the HumaneText OS X Service for years and have never had any trouble with it. However, earlier today I tried to use it to convert something from Markdown to XHTML and nothing happened. The menu is accessed (i.e., it flashes), but the text is not converted and the highlight is removed.

Any ideas? I’ve tried everything. All of my other services work without issue and any new services I install work just fine. I’m stumped.

Tagless voice-dialing on the BlackBerry Pearl

Ever since posting my Jawbone “review,” I’ve received a ton of e-mail asking specific questions about the headset (as I welcomed in the earlier post). A couple of months ago (yes, I’m just getting around to writing about this now; ugh) I received an inquiry from someone regarding whether the Jawbone supported tagless voice-dialing,¹ and in one of my very rare moments of gadget ignorance, I noted that that would be a function of the phone and not the headset, and that in any event I couldn’t test it because my BlackBerry Pearl didn’t support such a feature. In fact, I hadn’t heard of any phone that could do tagless voice-dialing. Imagine my surprise then when this guy e-mailed me back and told me that the Pearl is indeed capable of this little wonder.

Now, to be fair to me (and my fragile ego), I gave up on voice-dialing many years ago. It never seemed to work well (on any phone) and so I just kind of quit caring about it. Not to mention that recording tags for my most-called contacts was a ridiculous chore given the frequency with which I changed phones. In reading phone reviews (or writing my own), it was a subject I simply ignored completely, and in casual conversation I’d quickly dismiss it.

With that background experience in mind, you probably understand that I was fully expecting this tagless voice-dialing to suck to the point of unusable and for me to immediately fall back to my previous stance on the technology. But it didn’t suck. In fact, it hasn’t messed up once in almost two months of me using it. Not once.

Me: “Call Sarah.”
Phone: “Calling Sarah.”
Me: “Brillyunt!”

Color me impressed. Just one more reason the Pearl remains the best phone going right now (despite it having only EDGE). Other well-informed people agree.